


Doctor Donna

by esama



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Donna Noble, Gen, Timelord Donna Noble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 01:08:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esama/pseuds/esama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna forgets, learns, remembers and she carries on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Doctor Donna

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on fanfiction net on 05/26/2010  
> Proofread by Darlene and Sarah

Donna is thirty seven when she knows her memory doesn't work as well as it should. Bits and pieces are missing, hours, days and a few weeks here and there, giving her memory a holey appearance. The doctors call it Lacunar Amnesia and say that it will either go away or not, at which point it might continue and get worse. Since then she keeps track of the things that happen and a month later knows that no more things go missing. The things she lost do not come back, and though it bothers her for a while, it eventually stops being a primary concern. She has more important things to worry about, so she carries on.

She is two months from turning thirty eight when she stops needing a calculator. She doesn't notice it until month later, but once she does she can remember exactly when she stopped using it - when calculating difficult numbers became easier than before. To be honest, she'd rarely needed calculator anyway. Not only was she the sort of person who'd rather used a pen and paper than a machine, but she'd always been good with numbers, math had always been her strongest subject in school. But by the time she can add together numbers over eight digits in her head, multiply and then calculate their percentages in one sitting, she knows something is different. But she hardly minds it, so she carries on.

She is thirty eight and two months when, whilst visiting a doctor for headaches, afraid that she has finally inherited her late father's severe migraines, they discover the tumour. Growing behind her right lung, about the size of a thumb nail, it's too small to cause a fuss and too remote to bother her. The doctors say that it's benign and that it would be safer to leave it alone than to cut it out. Donna worries because her family doesn't have a history of tumours - brain and heart disease yes, but not tumours - but in the end she decides to go with what the doctors say. The tumour doesn't bother her and she is scheduled to go to check-ups about it once a month, so she carries on.

She is thirty eight and half when her job at the small transportation firm starts being utterly, disgustingly dull. It'd been quite exciting at first. The pace there was fast, there were always orders getting mixed up and she'd had to remain on her toes to keep up - not to mention the fact that she got to interact with the clients more than she usually did whilst temping, and that was a new and interesting experience. But then she can count the times and weights and payments and taxes and everything else from petrol and service expenses to the wages of the drivers and costs of the insurances in her head along with remembering all the orders and such without needing to write anything down. It begins to bore her. But it pays the bills and keeps her mother from nagging so she begins bringing Sudoku and crossword puzzles to work and carries on.

By the time she's worked at the transportation company for four months and had gone from crosswords to logic puzzles, she decides that it's time for change. She gets a computer and takes online classes just to try something new, just to keep herself occupied, to keep herself from getting bored. She brings her books to work, working with her online coursework during breaks and periods of quiet, but her co-workers and boss don't mind as long as she keeps it from interfering with her work. And it does. She finds that she can recite complicated calculus in her mind while writing down new orders and even when she's nose to the book she can still give the correct answer to any work-related question her co-workers can think of. She works, and reads and writes with her right hand while turning pages with her left, and talks on the phone while making notes on history. She stops being bored while continuing at the boring job, and that's good enough. And so she carries on.

When she turns thirty nine, she's left behind temping and gone back to school. The coursework has long since evolved into evening classes and there her teachers had told her that she ought to go and get a degree, as she certainly seemed to have the brains for it. She decides that she might as well. But by the time she's studied for two months, she decides that a degree isn't enough. She's getting a doctorate. Her mother seems sceptical but her grandfather is proud - and Donna is _brilliant_ and she has a plan now, so she carries on.

She's studied for six months when the tumour is found to have grown to the point where it might start bothering her. It's about half the size of her heart now, any bigger and it would start interfering with her breathing. The doctors want to cut it out. Donna, however, doesn't. She can breathe just fine, surgeries cost money and she's just gotten into the swing of studying. This surgery thing would just get in the way. Also, she has an odd feeling about the tumour in general. The doctors begrudgingly admit that the tumour isn't lethal yet, and that it's likely that her lung would just get used to it, so she carries on.

Her mother introduces her to a man - a medical doctor, actually. She says it's because of the tumour, but Donna knows she's hoping they'd hook up. That is never going to happen; she can tell it from the moment she lays her eyes on the man. There is something smarmy about the man and the way he talks… they just irritated her. Sylvia is disappointed and angry and annoyed, demanding to know what Donna is doing with her life, she's almost forty now, she's never going to find a man like this, but Donna has long since moved past that. She has numbers and books and computers and she can _calculate the trajectories of the stars in her mind_. Getting married, having children, and spending the last of the best years of her life raising kids who will never appreciate it no longer interests her in the least, so she ignores her mother and carries on.

She's forty when the second heart in her chest starts beating and she remembers everything. But at that point it's been three years since she's seen the Doctor, three years since she'd seen the universe, three years since _everything_. She's still in the midst of her studying - and she _loved it_. She was going to become a doctor of mathematics and nothing was going to stop her, not even a skinny streak of alien nothing who'd left her behind. She was busy, things were going well for her, she was being _brilliant_ , and she would have the time to slap the man later anyway, so she carries on.

But she can't help it. The memories come and go and she becomes more and more brilliant. She hacks the hospital computer system to ensure that the doctors wouldn't get any brilliant ideas about cutting out her second heart, or locking her up in some laboratory for testing. She has no intention of becoming an experiment for anyone, so she bulldozes the internet and everything connected to ensure her privacy. It works and the scheduled meetings with the doctors stop happening. People forget that she ever had a tumour. Her mother and grandfather still remember but she assures them that it's been dealt with and though suspicious they leave it alone. They suspect that she remembers. She doesn't care, because at that moment she's busy with becoming a doctor, and they kept things from her for three years which she's still bit miffed about, so she says nothing and she carries on.

She tracks down Matron Foster's sonic pen during the Easter holidays, mostly because her inner jacket pocket feels empty, rather than because she actually needs it. It's surprisingly easy, all she needs to do is to find the waste disposal route of that particular bin on that particular date and then track it back to the right landfill. Then she spends a moment turning bits of broken tablet computer and her old cell phone into a mobile alien tech detector. In that landfill she finds the sonic pen, along with an egg shaped metal device which is used to boil water and a broken alien flute. She takes them all home, and after cleaning the remains of four year old chips from the sonic pen it finds a permanent home in her pocket. Then, feeling less empty handed, she carries on.

She sees Martha in a jewellery store while looking for a bit of gold for the vortex manipulator she's been working on. Martha acts like she doesn't know her, so Donna answers in kind, and they exchange false first introductions. Martha is there buying an anniversary gift for her husband, and though Donna knows there's nothing she could've done differently, she still wishes she could've been there for her wedding. Donna doesn't know how she knows it, but she's certain that Martha is pregnant. It's the smell, it tingles on her tongue. But remembering the Doctor and his despicable oral fixation, Donna ignores it, congratulates Martha and after getting her gold, she carries on.

In the end the vortex manipulator never works because she can't find the right filter prism for it. But that isn't the end of it. By the time she leaves the university as Dr. Donna Noble, the alien tech detector has evolved from mobile to desktop and quite a bit more complicated than it originally was. It's through it that she finds out about a little bit of coral that could change everything. First thing after graduating, she goes to Cardiff, and uses her vastly improved sonic pen and mobile alien tech detector mark four to find the coral, buried in Cardiff bay. She hears that there was an explosion some years previous there, that Torchwood had vanished from Cardiff that same night, and wonders how Jack could've left the coral behind. In the end she picks up the piece tenderly and returns home, and with a little baby TARDIS growing in her living room, she carries on.

Sometime later the Doctor learns that she'd changed and remembered. But all he finds is an empty apartment full of the remnants of an old alien tech detector, which had been dismantled for spare parts for the growth enhancer, which then had been turned into a tightly controlled time dilation field generator, until finally that had become part of the new TARDIS's control column. Donna had remembered, learned, became a doctor, became magnificent and left, and in time and space, she carries on.


	2. Donna the Magnificent

1\. Introduction

 

"Nice stick you have there. Hello, I'm Doctor Donna Noble, and I'm here to stop you from starting a society of human sacrifice, obscene rituals and a filing system so illogical that it should be illegal. It's a pleasure to meet you. Now move along, bucko, before I shove that spear up where light doesn't shine, alright?"

 

2\. Love

She learned to love pretty early. It wasn't love in the human sense, where you first loved your parents, then your toys, then your friends, your best friends, then your partner, and finally your own children. No, this was love in the way of a wanderer who loved and left, and continued to love after being left, because if she didn't she'd drown in sorrow. She loved time and stardust and new things and innocent wonder and eventually learned to close her eyes to the darkness, filth, pain and bitterness that life could harbour. Love, really, made it all worth it.

 

3\. Light

 

Starlight and the light of distant galaxies, fire in fireplaces and candle flames and torches and houses burning down, the light of supernovas and the gas clouds where stars formed… it all had nothing on the light in the eyes of a little boy after she had, in a fit of boredom when a new planet offered no excitement, shown him how to work her sonic pen. Twenty years later when the boy had become the professor of an intergalactic university and created a new sonic technology, the light continued to burn bright and brilliant. It was wonder, curiosity and imagination. The brightest stars in the universe.

  
4\. Dark

 

A star had burned out, leaving nothing but a hole of blackness in its wake. Donna had come to watch the process more out of curiosity than anything else, but even while watching she knew that it was all an illusion, a trick of the light. The black hole was indeed black, but it was surrounded by light, the accretion disk glowing brightly around the hole as stars and solar systems burned in the gravity well. And one day it would exhale all it swallowed in brilliant gas jet, and maybe she'd be there to watch. In the end, it wasn't darkness, only gravity that took away the light from one moment to release it in another.

She'd have to travel to the end of the universe itself to see real darkness, the kind that wouldn't be replaced, the kind that would never exhale light. She didn't much care to try though.

  
5\. Seeking Solace

The TARDIS was young and hummed away excitedly, letting out little chirps and hiccups now and then when something especially interesting happened somewhere within its complicated systems or around its disguised hull. Donna loved the noises, and the liveliness of her young ship. She wasn't quiet herself after all, swearing up a storm whenever things didn't go her way. It was amusing how the TARDIS around her would beep and babble incoherent twinges and whistles whenever she did. In the noises, she found long sought relief and calm.

 

6\. Break Away

 

"Really, I mean it. I'm honoured, really, but I'm a busy woman. Your planet is all wonderful, of course it is, but I'm sort of a traveller you see. And the definition of a traveller is to travel, right? So, I am not staying here - things to do, civilisations to rescue, running to do, things like that. You hear me? How about you let go of me? Yes, no? Okay, how about I use my little sonic device here to introduce a feed loop of power inside the circuits here, cut off the cooling fluid feed here, take down the safety protocols, turn off the filters and then blow up this control matrix here? How about you let me go _now_?"

  
7\. Heaven

 

There is a wonderful planet in the Isop galaxy called the Boe-Quadrate in the year two hundred thousand and three. It's full of spas, luxury hotels, entertainment centres, theme parks, beautiful gardens, endless shopping malls and it has the best water parks imaginable. It's owned by the oldest and possibly wealthiest creature in the galaxy. Donna spends a full month there, completely re-filling her wardrobe, having her nails done a dozen times, changing her hair style every week, getting exactly twenty four massages, and gossiping with the Face of Boe about the galaxy, kids and what a bastard the Doctor could be. She leaves promising to visit the Face once the Boemina were born.

  
8\. Innocence

It was by accident that Donna met Charlotte Abigail Lux. She's in the neighbourhood, quite literally, visiting a neighbouring company of Even-Bee Industries, who had taken up the nasty habit of using living humans as components in their so called wondrous organic technology. It was simply so nasty that Donna had to put stop to it, and while doing so she met Felman Lux while he and little Charlotte were in the company building. While Felman and one of the company's workers were talking about the Nodes, Donna talked about books and stories with Charlotte, and remembered Lee and two children who'd never been.

She made sure that Felman Lux got the Nodes contract before she brought Even-Bee Industries down for violation of human rights.

 

9\. Drive

It's the pump of her twin hearts and the rush of adrenaline that keeps her going, the twitchy feeling of her hands and feet, and the little hamster somewhere in her stomach. It's wonderful, the excitement, the wonder, the thrill. But the reason to return is different. The gentle chirping of her TARDIS, the tea her mother makes back on Earth in the twenty first century and the way her grandfather's eyes light up when she tells him what it looks like when a new star is born. There is home and home and _home_.

 

10\. Breathe Again

She gasps for breath while the medic holds a mask to her face, looking worriedly. "You weren't breathing for _twenty minutes_!" the medic gasps, his eyes wide with shock and wonder. The lights were flickering slightly behind him, but at least they were on. "You should be _dead_!"

Donna grins behind the mask, breathing sweet, sweet air. "Respiratory by-pass," she explains, coughing the words out weakly before breathing in again. "Is everyone alright?"

The young - too young - commander behind the medic nods. "You managed to get the life support back up and running in time," he said, looking at her in wonder. "And because the nursery runs on a separate power cell, we lost no one."

Donna closes her eyes and breathes a sigh of relief.

 

11\. Memory

 

Sometimes Donna feels like an intruder in her own head. When she remembers a wife and children and a planet and a wonderfully brilliant grandchild and times in the Academy and travels through space and time, all of which weren't hers, which hadn't happened to her, which she'd never witnessed. She remembers intimate moments and happiness and adventures and endless days of unfathomable grief over lost people, lost friends and lost family, and feels like she's treading upon sacred ground, trespassing in someone's house and flicking through their family albums. She mourns a world she hadn't lost and feels guilty for doing so.

 

12\. Insanity

She knows that the Doctor is a little mental. He's mental in many ways and in many situations. There's the deep-rooted insanity buried underneath layers and layers of barriers renamed as personal quirks - in memories hidden behind wide grins and sparkling eyes and feet too gangly and too fast for the rest of the body to keep up with. It shows in moments like when a red spider dies and when a family is made to live forever. Then there's the goofy craziness of sticking your finger into a mysterious pool of goo and tasting it, of grinning widely while running towards the source of the nearest explosion, of speaking too loud, too fast, just to make people jump. It's almost innocent, or would be if it wasn't forced.

 What worries Donna most is the insanity hanging at the end of the rope, sawing it and then falling into a dark pit without knowing how far the bottom is or if there is one at all. Sometimes she wonders if she'll end up there one day too, when she's lost too much to bear, become a person with nothing to live for over and over and over again, so many times that she's forgotten what it was like to live for something. She swears she won't, she fears she will.

 

13\. Misfortune

It's really quite unfortunate, that thing about the Belgea'ona of the Fourth Syndicate. They had such a good thing going on, they could've gotten far. Their merchandise was top notch, they delivered on time, they were cheap, considering, and they didn't make a fuss. They even had a good hiring policy and they paid good wages to their employees, along with extremely good benefits which included everything from dental care to genetic engineering. It was quite a unfortunate what happened, unfortunate indeed.

There was once upon a time a syndicate that thrived on illegal cloning and slave trade. Donna did business with it once. Just once.

 

14\. Smile

 

The first thing the Doctor does when he sees her an alien planet is smile. He keeps smiling at her when she marches up at him and slaps him hard. He's still smiling when he pulls her to his chest. He stops smiling when she knees him to the crotch.

 

15\. Silence

 

Donna checks the Library two times, once, a year after she visited it the first time, and then a hundred years after that. It remains the same.

  
16\. Questioning

The Doctor talks too much, babbles on, continuously, about this and that, saying that that isn't exactly impossible, whilst that other thing is kind of probable, but the third thing is utterly impracticable, and don't even mention the fourth thing and seriously what was that fifth thing about… He talks and talks and talks and in the end doesn't say anything at all.

"Really," Donna says and hands him a banana milkshake - just to show off that her TARDIS has a better kitchen. "I'm _fine_."

For a moment the Doctor relaxes before launching into lengthy speech on how wonderful bananas were.

 

17\. Blood

 

Donna gets used to blood. Not because she sees battles or dying people or anything like that, though those were sadly part of her life now. Mostly it's because she's still pretty unused to working with engines and her TARDIS is still a bit rough around the edges. She nicks her knuckles and burns her fingertips and there's always some sharp edge that gives her paper cuts when she tries to improve this or that system. At first she always got out the disinfectant and plasters and so forth, but eventually she just sticks her wounded finger to her mouth and continues on working. She's even adjusted to the fact that her blood no longer tastes like iron.

  
18\. Rainbow

The first planet where Donna and the Doctor travel to, both piloting their own TARDISes, is a planet with very odd weather patterns. "Land of the perpetual rainbow, they call this place," the Doctor says as he saunters out of his blue Police Box and Donna locks the door of her red telephone box. "It's because of the twin suns and the local weather phenomena. See, the Geannath doesn't have weather as normal people know it, instead they have this eternal mist - has something to do with the planet's volcanic activity and the fact that they don't have your average wind here. So, the atmosphere is constantly saturated with water vapour and there's always one sun up, and therefore there is always a rainbow somewhere…"

Donna rolls her eyes while linking her arm with his and abstains from mentioning the fact that, yes, she knew, Time Lord consciousness, ring a bell? There is fondness in the thought, but that doesn't keep her from interjecting, "Does it mean that there's particularly proud Gay Pride movement here? Seems like the perfect place for it."

"It's the fifty first century, Donna. You'll find that the Gay Pride movement has swept across the galaxies. Everyone's dancing freestyle these days," he answers cheekily and continues to babble about rainbows.

 

19\. Gray

Donna has a suit. She bought it on a whim from Boe-Quadrate, as a joke of sorts. She'd even shown it to the Face of Boe and the two of them had had a nice laugh over it. It was grey with blue pinstripes and just out of cheek Donna also bought a blue button up shirt, tie and converses to go with it. It fits her perfectly, she made sure of it, and though she's never worn it and never will, it hangs in her closet in a place of honour.

She swears never to show it to the Doctor, though. She'd never hear the end of it.

 

20\. Fortitude

Donna eventually turns right and leaves the Doctor to travel by himself. They'll meet again, she's sure of it. For two people travelling through space and time like they were, the universe could be rather small at times - and they'd already met "accidentally" so many times that it was bound to happen again. But she has her own ship and drive and goal and journey now - she has her own song - and though it was so very tempting to go back to the good old times, she can't return to holding the Doctor's hand.

 

21\. Vacation

"This is the automated answering machine of Doctor Donna Noble of the Time and Relative Dimension in Space Mark Forty Point Two. Doctor Donna Noble is currently unavailable due to the recent establishment of the Luxury Cruise One Hundred Thousand company. You may attempt to contact Doctor Donna Noble on her mobile phone, or call again at a later date. Be advised that at this time Doctor Donna Noble is not available for saving worlds, rescuing civilisations, defeating terrible creatures, or any form of running. Suggestion of any of the above or anything similar may be met with harsh language and temperamental retorts. Have a nice day."

 

22\. Mother Nature

It was a pure accident. Really. Donna was only trying to benefit the poor withered world by introducing a little bit of greenery and maybe taking some hydrogen and oxygen from a nearby gas giant and throwing them together to get some water - seriously, they were from an uninhabitable planet, the elements, no one would miss them, and the little planet needed water more than the gas giant needed its fourth spot. She was only doing the world a service, making it a little better place to live. That was all she had wanted.

Though she has to say, her priestesses grew some mean grapes.

 

23\. Cat

The Doctor left a lot of loose ends wherever he went. Actually, he mostly created the loose ends. He came, solved a problem, ended a war, dismissed a rotten official, destroyed a facility, stopped an invasion, whatever. And then he left, leaving other people to pick up the pieces. Donna, who hated nothing more than a messy house, found herself picking up the mess the Doctor left in his wake. That was how she ended up on New Earth and in the New (New New New New New New New New New New New New New) New York.

And like she had predicted, they were doing badly. Novice Hame was kind and diligent, but she was no politician or government official, and she certainly had no idea how to work an office. So Donna marches in, pulls up her sleeves and creates a government. She spends weeks reorganising the senate, she sets up a vote for a new president - which is eventually won by a cat called Thomas Kincade Brannigan - as well as other new officials, and after making sure that everything was set in motion and that they should be able to make the whole thing work, she turns to leave.

Novice Hame ends up coming with her, and becoming her very first companion though space and time.

 

24\. No Time

She had all the time in the world at the tips of her fingers. Her TARDIS could go anywhere, any when within the long lifespan of the universe - and though she suspected that it could go before and after with some tweaking, it wasn't something she dared to try. She'd seen the birth of the Earth and had glimpsed its end, she'd seen stars born and die, people grow old - and grow young, when she hopped through time backwards just for fun.

And still, sometimes, there was no time at all. Sometimes she appeared on a planet only to see that it had been just moment before it was devastated by a war or plague or other cataclysmic event. Sometimes she reached for a person's hand only to see that it wasn't attached to their shoulder anymore, sometimes she answered a call for help only to find that it was a recording of the long dead crew of a long since frozen space ship.

It made her wonder about how many times the Doctor had arrived to a similar situation and ended up with the same conclusion that sometimes all the time in the universe wasn't enough.

 

25\. Trouble Lurking

Catpeople, Donna quickly found out, were both similar to and nothing like humans. Hame talked and walked and had the general physical structure of a human, but some things were different. Donna didn't mind the differences, in fact there was something particularly refreshing in having a cat on board. Sure it was a bit tricky whenever Hame went into heat - talk about awkward - and there was that thing about clawing the walls - something the TARDIS did not appreciate - but that was okay. People were different, and aside from those tendencies Hame was nice enough.

Still, Donna wished that the Novice would stop stalking her whenever she was in particularly playful mood.

 

26\. Tears

After getting slightly tired of Hame's endless amount of rather ill-fitting robes which didn't flatter the Novice in the slightest, Donna decided to visit Boe-Quadrate again for a little shopping. She should've thought better, because when the Face of Boe immediately sends a message to her that it was about goddamned time, where had she been and wasn't she going to come to meet the family, Hame cries.

"Timelines," Donna explains to the Face of Boe who looks at the cat confusedly. "Better not ask." In true Jack fashion, the immortal nods his head before ushering Donna to meet his youngest children. Hame's tears stall at the sight of the newly born Boemina and then she was too full of wonder to say much of anything.

Donna would've happily let Hame stay and play nursemaid for the Face of Boe's children, but didn't dare to, not with Hame knowing how and when and where the Fact of the Universe would die and the Face of Boe being a telepath of grand proportions. She does promise that they could visit again, though.

 

27\. Foreign

There's a foreign element in Donna's body and mind. On some days she feels it stronger than others, on some days when it's too cold or too warm or when the wind blows just so, she finds herself shaking. She doesn't feel quite right with the element. She feels half-done, like a cake not completely baked, an egg not completely boiled, a bit too soft in the centre. She feels at odds with herself.

It takes her ages to realise that the foreign element isn't the little bit of Time Lord in her.

 

28\. Sorrow

 

The Doctor finds her and Hame on a small moon where they'd been solving a little problem with the local healthcare system - nothing too serious, just some odd organ theft habit the locals have. He hovers behind Donna's shoulder, politely waiting for her to finish, which worries Donna most of all. She finishes her business and sets the healthcare system back on its proper tracks before turning to him. He doesn't say anything when she walks up to him, only steps forward a little, looking helpless and hopelessly lost.

Donna has no idea what's wrong, even years later, the Doctor won't tell. It doesn't matter thought. She knows what she has to do and as she folds the man into her arms, she wonders what a special, sorrowful privilege it is to be the shoulder to cry on for the Lonely God.

 

29\. Happiness

 

The Doctor stays with Donna and Hame long enough to see Hame meet a man and fall in love. It's during a short war between two populations on a small planet where Donna had decided to go just to see the wonderful rings the planet had. In their usual style, Donna and the Doctor got tangled up in the war and help end it. Hame's beloved, Victor, is one of the soldiers in the war, a man who lost both his eyes in an explosion.

On Hame's insistence, Donna brings the man with her. She even goes so far as to find a place where they can repair the man's eyes, though Donna was pretty sure that Hame could've done it herself without much help. Victor travels with them only for a little while before he and Hame only have eyes for each other.

Donna suspected for a while that it would never work, though. Hame was a cat after all and though cats and humans were compatible in the years five billion and onwards, the man was from year seventy four thousand. But she's wrong. It's possible that Hame's past as part of highly advanced medical society, even if they were doing their medicine in a horribly wrong way, helps them there. Differences don't seem to matter for the two of them, and despite all odds they make it work.

Donna and the Doctor leave Hame and Victor on the man's home world after Hame finds herself pregnant. They later visit the little family when the litter has been born and for the first time in a while, the Doctor laughs.

  
30\. Under the Rain

It's raining when the Doctor leaves again. Before going he apologises for being a bother, for being a nuisance, for being annoying, for being an alien streak of nothing - he even starts to apologise for using all the hot water and for hogging the blanket before she slaps him.

"I'm grateful, though. That you're there," the Doctor says awkwardly, his shoulders slouched, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on his feet and for a moment Donna seriously expects him to kick the muddy ground to complete the image of sheepish teenager. "I need somebody, not just to stop me and… it's nice to know. That you're there."

"You're welcome," Donna answers, rolling her eyes. "Now, why do we have to say this here instead of, say, inside where it's nice and cosy and warm?" she asked pointedly. "I'm soaked to the bone because of you! If I get sick, I'm sending you the medical bill, I am. Stupid spaceman, getting both of us ill in this weather…"

She continues muttering sniping insults at him even when he grins like a loony and gives her a sopping wet hug. She swears there's a skip in his steps when he heads back to his silly Police Box. Though, on other hand, a bright red telephone box on an alien moon isn't exactly inconspicuous either.

That's sentimentality for you.

 

31\. Flowers

Donna has two gardens in her TARDIS. First is the garden of simple necessity. Food needs to come from somewhere and even the TARDIS can't make things completely out of nothing - just almost. The systems are all automated and without anyone needing to tend to them, everything she needs grows by itself, everything from grain to vegetables to fruits and grapes and even herbs and spices.

The second garden is for aesthetic purposes. It's a flower garden, full of all the most beautiful flowers in the universe. Well, most of them. She knows better than to think that she's seen them all, so more are added every now and then - usually by the TARDIS because Donna's mostly too busy running and solving problems and scolding stupid people to do it. Either way, it's her fourth favourite place on the TARDIS, after the control room, the library and her personal quarters.

There's an entire corner in the garden reserved for roses. Donna tries not to look too deeply into that.

 

32\. Night

There is no time inside a ship that can be anywhere and any-when. That's why Donna finds her visits back home on Earth to be more than a little important to her mental health. The Time Lord bit in her is growing steadily over the years, but some part of her still remains human and humans need their cycles. She needs a day and night. That's why she usually stays on Earth for a few days before going out again.

She drinks her coffee in the morning, her tea in the afternoon, has her evening meal with her family, and when the night comes she and Wilf head up the hill just to watch the stars. And there Donna closes her eyes and sighs and wonders how odd it has become, these sorts of ordinary moments in time, ordinary circles, natural happenings. The slower path. Sun and moon, day and night… she'd lost touch to them at some point.

It was nice to remember, sometimes, what a night was like.

 

33\. Expectations

Because of her mother's nagging about how Donna would never meet a man running around space and time, the second companion Donna picks up is a man. He's a professor from the Mars university from the twenty eight century and he and Donna stopped a very odd alien plot inside the campus which involved fungi and intelligence eating butterflies, though Donna was still a bit confused about the whole thing. The professor, named Alan Delmont, was a curious man and reminded Donna a little of the Doctor - except instead of licking things, Alan had a habit of sniffing things.

When their trip to a colony on Titan in the year three thousand, two hundred and twenty eight turns out badly and Alan is seduced by a space pirate of all things, Donna decides that really, she's more than old enough to think for herself, and it was time to stop trying to live up to her mother's expectations.

 

34\. Stars

There are meetings one imagines ahead or redesigns after the fact. For one, Donna's first meeting with the Doctor maybe didn't go as she would've wished it to go nowadays, and she'd imagined their second meeting a million times before it had happened - it rather exceeded her expectations though. But the meetings one could hope would come but never really thinks about because they're simply _impossible_ , those are the ones which can shock a person most.

Donna meets Jenny in a space observatory on a planet called Galahad Three. She decided to check the place out because it's the best space observatory in the sixty first century and because she wants to know what the new hologram space theatre looks like. The fact that the opening ceremony of the hologram theatre is the biggest event of the decade has _nothing_ to do with the fact, absolutely nothing. Maybe a little. Can one blame a girl for wanting to dance a little?

When she gets there, the place is packed with people, there's an entire orchestra playing and everyone is wearing fancy dresses and suits. She wears a gown suitable of the period of time and drinks a non-alcoholic beverage - she's the driver after all. And then, out of the blue, Jenny is there, young and blonde and rather less soldier-like than the last time Donna saw her - and remarkably lively for a dead person.

Later, when reunions have happened, explanations have been given and Jenny's made herself comfortable in the new room on Donna's TARDIS, the part human part Time Lord wonders about meetings and chances and coincidences and whether the two-way biological metacrisis had somehow made Jenny Donna's half-daughter.

 

35\. Hold My Hand

"The first planet I went to after leaving Messaline was called Adamire," Jenny explains quietly. "It's a little planet, populated mostly by people called Graa'omns. Kinda like birds with tentacles," she makes a wiggly motion with her fingers. "Took a bit of time to get adjusted to the way they looked, but other than that they were pretty nice… peaceful people, good flyers, yeah? Not much for runners though, hard to run with talons…"

She's quiet for so long that Donna knows something went wrong on the planet. After taking a sip of her tea - and Jenny liked her tea just as much as the Doctor did, the weird British-mimicking aliens the both of them - she continued. She told about a faction of the Graa'omn society, the scienthood - which was a sort of mixture of science, religion and sister/brotherhood. "Of course it's not called that, but the actual name doesn't translate, so humans just called it the scienthood," Jenny shrugged before continuing her tale.

It didn't have a happy ending. Donna found that most times when people mixed science and religion, it ended badly. Feeling sorry for the girl who'd gotten such a bad first off-planet experience, Donna reached her hand forward and clasped Jenny's in hers. Then she told the girl about the Sycorax and the Racnoss and Pompeii and they talk about death and devastation until the TARDIS's carefully programmed night cycle beings.

 

36\. Precious Treasure

Donna knows that she needs to take Jenny to the Doctor. At least she needed to let the Time Lord know his daughter lived if nothing else. Not just for Jenny's sake - because Jenny is a strong girl, she can handle herself without a dad to watch over her. It was for the Doctor's sake, simply enough. Nine hundred years and ten sets of twin hearts, all broken - the man needed a daughter, a family, something to _live for_.

Usually when she wanted to see the Doctor, Donna would've just hunted him down the old fashioned Time Lord way - tracking him down by following the ripples across time. This time, however, she felt there was no time for fun and games. So, instead of doing it the interesting hard way, she takes out her cell phone and rings the other TARDIS.

Without telling him what it was about, she demands they'd have a date back on Earth - she needed to restock some coffee anyway and she'd run out of her favourite shampoo too. The Doctor agrees, sounding both begrudging and curious because they both knew that despite everything, they weren't the sort of people to call each other just for nothing.

They meet in a nondescript little park which turned into the most important place in the universe when the Doctor sees Jenny. Watching the father and daughter reunited, Donna discreetly takes out a camera from thirty fourth millennia, and captures a hologram image of the Lonely God holding his child close.

 

37\. Eyes

 

The Doctor was a master with them. The eyebrows, the eyelids, throw in bit of a pout, a little slouch, bow his head just so. And on top of that, he had the darn glasses on.

"Alright, fine, I'll come along. For now," Donna growled, quickly looking away as the Doctor's face split into blinding grin. As the Doctor and Jenny hugged each other in triumph, Donna harrumphed and rolled her eyes. Hadn't she been immune to the bleeding puppy dog eyes once?

 

38\. Abandoned

Out of retaliation, Donna demands to select where they will go first. "The Gamestation," she says, folding her arms, unwilling to compromise. "You, Rose and Jack left behind bit of a mess there and it's time to clean it up. Don't you think?"

The Doctor looks like it was a death sentence, but Donna doesn't care. Neither does Jenny, who ends up learning quite bit about Earth's history and proper filing and how to set up a new information and communication network and how to rebuild a society in twenty four hours. "Of course nothing here was exactly ruined," the Doctor mutters sullenly. "The Daleks never made it to Earth."

"And still they made a mess which you never bothered to clear up," Donna says calmly while creating a temporary information relay program which would hopefully teach the people of Earth how to properly use mass media without falling victim to massive alien plots in the meanwhile. "You swagger in, explode things, and then you swagger out. That's what you do, you swagger on. Hmph. You should try having some responsibility."

"I am responsible!"

"Yeah right. Visited New Earth lately? You left quite a mess there too, you know. Took me months to fix it up, months. Whatever made you think that Hame was fit to run a government? She was a _nurse_ , a Novice at that!"

Jenny watches them bicker with a little smile on her face and despite the Doctor's mutterings, Donna recreates the mass media of Earth and even forces the Doctor to take them two years into the future to see that it was actually working, instead of leaving the place to its own devices and into the hands of the next set of alien conquerors.

 

39\. Dreams

 

Donna sleeps more than the Doctor and Jenny, though only by a few hours. She used to need six to seven hours per night, once upon a time, but that was before dual cardiovascular system and respiratory bypass and all the other changes she usually didn't think about too closely. Either way, she was still human enough to sleep just long enough to dream.

She dreamed of memories mostly, things that had happened, books she had read, movies she had seen. These days she mostly dreams about the Doctor's memories, remembering people she never met and loves she'd never loved. But once in a while, she dreams something of her own, something only hers. She dreams of Lee and the family that had never been, crashing down in the shadows of the Vashta Nerada.

She continues shaking until she reaches the kitchen where the Doctor is explaining the history of bananas to a highly amused Jenny. The two either do not notice her or pretend not to, as she leans on the doorframe and sighs and feels home.

 

40\. Rated

 

"Oh, come on! That's not fair!" Donna yells angrily at the judges. "Didn't you see what she did? Where are your eyes, people, are you bleeding blind? Come _on_ , she's the best competitor in this bloody competition and everyone here knows it! I demand another scoring! That was pure bull --"

"Donna," the Doctor grabs her hand and drags her back to her seat. "The competition is rigged, that's why we're here, that's why Jenny's in it, remember? It's all part of the plan, you know."

"Oh don't you start. Didn't you see the scores they gave her? That's bollocks, that is. I oughta go down there and give those idiots some numbers of my own…"

"I don't see what's wrong with nine point five out of ten."

  
41\. Teamwork

Jenny is the fastest of them, so she always goes ahead. She checks for routes, for traps and if there was any possible pit they had to cross, she'd have found a way by the time the rest made it there. The Doctor was the quickest of them with his hands, so he kept the rear. If there was a door to be locked or a little explosion to be rigged or maybe a random heat pipe that could use a hole or two, he was their man. And Donna, in the middle kept her eyes on both of them to make sure that neither of them did something stupid like go ahead to fight someone off or stay back to distract pursuers or anything like that.

And later Jenny, who had field medic's knowledge still perfectly contained in her mind thanks to the progenation machine that had given birth to her on Messaline, bandaged any possible wounds while the Doctor got them off the hostile planet and set course possibly for a safer place to stay and later Donna would make them tea or food or possibly run a warm bath - or get the heaviest spanner in the ship to whack one of them with - whichever was needed. It all usually came with a little bit of bickering, Jenny assuring her father that yes, she was indeed a soldier, and the Doctor being indignant and self-righteous, and Donna telling the both of them that they were insane and would be dead without her and if they kept it up she'd ground them both.

It worked pretty well for them.

 

42\. Standing Still

Jenny has never seen snow, so the Doctor takes them to a planet where there is some. Donna knows it's not a coincidence that it's the Ood Sphere, but says nothing and remains quiet, and a little smug. The Ood Sphere was the first alien planet she saw with the Doctor and there is more than little sentimentality there. Whether it's because of sentimentality or because Donna has brought stricter cleaning rules to the older TARDIS doesn't matter.

She can hear the Ood song now. It's no longer the heart breaking song of captivity or the triumphant, joyful song of freedom, but a song of peace and home. She hears it without help from the Doctor and without the Ood there in person to make her hear it, and it both relieves and saddens her. To no longer need the Doctor's help to hear or see the miracles of the universe… of course it had been like that for a while now, but only now it truly feels like she's outgrown his help.

And yet, they stand there together, the Doctor, Donna and Jenny, listening to the song of peace, she wonders if equality is such a bad thing after all.

 

43\. Dying

"If I die, will I regenerate?" Donna more muses out loud than she asks the question, and yet it makes the Doctor jump a little. It has so far been an unspoken thing between them, the matter of how much of her was Time Lord and how much of her was human these days, never really addressed. Yet she'd wondered and she knew he had too.

With the subject on the surface now, she continues. "I've stopped aging," she says. "Well, not stopped, but… it's been ten years since I made my own TARDIS. Look at me, I'm over fifty years old. Where are my wrinkles?" she tugs the corner of her eye. "Nowhere. Not that I mind it, certainly. If I'd aged, my boobs would've started sagging by now."

The Doctor coughs awkwardly and very carefully doesn't look down. "Well…" he murmurs, looking away. "I don't know. You have two hearts like a Time Lord and your mind can hold a Time Lord's consciousness, but…" he tapped the table with his fingers thoughtfully. "I suppose it's possible. I think we need to figure out how much of a Time Lord you are, though," he decides. "To make sure."

"I'm twice as good as you are," Donna answers and kicks him under the table.

 

44\. Two Roads

Donna misses her young TARDIS on occasion. It's still back on Earth, standing in that small park with an "Our of service" note handing on its door. With the chameleon circuit in place and perception filter up and running, people probably didn’t even see it there, walking around it, passed it, ignoring it… She wondered if her TARDIS was lonely.

"I can take you back if you want to go on," the Doctor says awkwardly, grinning, swinging on the balls of his feet, hands in his pockets, in that _I'm always alright_ way in which he wasn't really alright at all.

Donna takes it in for a moment before smiling. It was rather endearing that one of the most powerful beings in the universe couldn't lie to save his life - quite literally. "Idiot," she says fondly. "My TARDIS can wait for a while."

 

45\. Illusion

"Hey, isn't that…? Yes it is! Ja--" Donna cuts off when the Doctor clamps his hand over her mouth. She looks up indignantly, wondering what he's on about it. It was Jack and Jack was a friend, wasn't he? So why couldn't she call out to him, to say hello?"

"Don't," he says tensely, lowering his head slightly and staring at the scene ahead of them tensely. "Think. I've been here before."

Knowing that he only used single world sentences when he was serious and got cryptic when he was worried, Donna frowned and looked back to the handsome fifty-first-century conman. Then a realisation dawned as she saw the woman he was walking with and the man leading the way. As the Doctor behind her lowered his hand, Donna sighed. "Wow… that's… _blimey_."

"What is?" Jenny asked confusedly, looking at here Donna and the Doctor were looking. "Who are those people?"

"Echoes from the past," the Doctor answered tensely and turned away with a jerk. Donna glanced after him sadly before looking back after three people in the distance. She hadn't remembered that they too had visited Sangleem - but then again, that time nothing particularly interesting had happened to make the visit memorable, aside from the sightseeing tour around the glass pyramids, and she couldn't remember every single detail of the Doctor's life. Thankfully.

"That's the thing about travelling through time," Donna said, turning to confused Jenny. "Sometimes you cross your own timelines." Turning completely away from the Doctor's ninth regeneration, young Rose Tyler and still mortal Jack Harkness, she started explaining the significance of the moment.

 

46\. Family

It slips out of Jenny's lips completely by accident during a conversation which followed another, which had been about a family show they'd been watching at the time. Donna doesn't blame her, despite everything Jenny's only a few years old now and every kid gets confused, even if they're artificially grown to adolescence. It's the Doctor who is most shocked by it, freezing where he sits in the awkward control room pilot chair and turning to Donna like expecting an explosion, though she has no idea _why_.

"Doctor, I've been a mother before," she says patronisingly to him and throws her arm around Jenny's shoulders. The blonde girl grins at her while the Doctor looks at Donna strangely for a moment before he grins awkwardly. Just because she can, she reaches over to kick him. "Behold, Mister No Domestics in the TARDIS I Just Finished Cleaning."

"That was the last regeneration," the Doctor answers awkwardly. "Things have… changed."

"I bet they have," Donna mutters amusedly.

"What's a motorcycle?" Jenny interrupts them, nodding to the screen in the control column. The Doctor launches into a lengthy explanation about combustion engines and such while Donna rolls her eyes and whispers that a motorcycle is a contraption of shiny scrap metal on two wheels, only slightly better than a hover bike for the sole reason that it mostly followed the laws of gravity. Jenny grins, burrows deeper between them and chews her popcorn contently.

 

47\. Creation

After taking one look at the temple and at the kneeling priests, the Doctor turns to his elder companion. "Mother Nature, Donna? Really?"

Donna snorts. "Well, at least I left behind a highly sophisticated culture which respects nature, common sense and manners. Also they grow good grapes." She cast him a sly look. "All you leave behind is havoc and chaos and lots of rubble. At least I made something good."

Jenny looks around confusedly before turning to them looking curious. "What's Mother Nature?"

"Creator of all life, governor of fertility, the source of all water," the closest priestess chants. "Bringer of light and warmth, inducer of health and prosperity…"

"Something like that," Donna answers before marching forward and getting the priestesses to their feet again. "And I thought it told you to cut off this kneeling business last time around. No woman belongs on her knees! Now, show me your libraries, I want to know how those archives are doing."

Later, when the priestesses think to ask about it, Donna introduces the Doctor as the Lord of Chaos and Jenny as the Goddess of War and Spring. Jenny seems pleased and the Doctor doesn't stop sputtering indignantly for hours. The name fits though, considering the havoc he ends up wreaking across the temple in search of an alien plant which was slowly consuming the foundations and would continue on until it enveloped the entire world if left in peace.

Sometime later the Doctor expresses righteous anger over the fact that Donna hadn't introduced him as Father Time.

 

48\. Childhood

Sometimes, when they visit populated planets, Donna catches Jenny looking at passing families with small children with an odd look about her face. She wonders what it's like, to be born nearly an adult with all the knowledge you need to do your duty packed in your head and nothing more. Jenny had never been a child, hadn't grown up, hadn't even experienced adolescence. And she never would.

Donna wishes, sometimes, that she could change it. Offer Jenny the chance to be a toddler, to let her play around in the sand, to be carefree and innocent. When she thinks about it, that's the most horrible thing about the way Jenny was born. She'd never been allowed to be innocent. Instead she'd been created to fight. To kill in a war of seven days and countless generations, all butchered in a matter of hours after their birth.

The Doctor seems to notice it too, because eventually he takes them to the most childish theme park in the Milky Way Galaxy where the three of them make complete fools out of themselves and laugh until their stomach’s ache. It's a poor substitute, but it's a good attempt, and aside from the fact that the theme park is then taken over by odd brain slugs which people have to kill by squishing them with gigantic hammers, it's a pretty good family holiday

 

49\. Stripes

"What is it with the stripes anyway?" Jenny asks curiously after the Doctor had changed out of his dirtied brown suit into his blue one after one particularly messy adventure on a planet with a lot of swamps. "You always wear a suit, and it always has stripes on it."

"Time Lord thing. A little bit of familiarity in the midst of the oddities of the universe," the Doctor says importantly while adjusting his tie. "Or it might just be me. I prefer to always wear similar clothes. And as they say, the clothes make the man."

Donna thinks of the suit in her own TARDIS and narrows her eyes. "Vertical stripes make you look thinner," she snorts. "And you already look like a skinny weasel in a suit."

"I do not," the Doctor huffs. "Pinstripes suit me," he then said, running his hand over his lapels. "Besides, compared to what some of my previous regenerations wore… trust me, this is in the better end of fashion style."

Donna chuckles, knowing exactly what he was talking about. "We really need to show some recordings about that to Jenny," she says. "She'd get a kick out of it."

"Out of what? And why would I be kicked for it?" the girl asks confusedly.

 

50\. Breaking the Rules

 

"Best law to take a break from, gravity," Doctor says excitedly after they'd entered the oddest ball Donna had ever seen - aside from a few in her memories. It is the year two thousand and forty eight and they were currently in the Earth's first commercial space station - which was, amusingly enough, named Babylon. It was the second anniversary of the station, hence the celebration - and a lot of rich people trying to wear fancy ball gowns which would not stay down decently in zero gravity.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Donna says calmly while accepting a metal cocktail glass with a lid from the magnetic tray of a waitress floating passed her. "I'm going to barf all over this place and hope to god we'll be banned from this place forever."

"You can't be feeling sick. I gave you all the right medicine to combat zero gravity nausea," the Doctor answered with a grin while examining his metal glass. "Humans think of everything, don't they?" he asked with amazement at the sight of the lid on the glass and the neat little straw poking out of the lid. "You can even make kitchen appliances which work in zero gravity! Who _thinks_ like that?"

"Watch who you're calling human, spaceman," Donna snapped before glancing at Jenny, who seemed to be having the time of her life, floating upside down beside them. "Fun?" she asked with a grin.

"I've been in zero gravity before, when the artificial gravity generator of my first ship broke, but this is different," Jenny grinned, making a flip to turn right way around. "More space!"

They weren't the only ones breaking the rules, or so they found out about hour later when a bunch of thugs were revealed to have brought something as stupid as guns on board, and who were now intending to hold everyone in the station hostage for money. Really, that was about as normal as a party could ever be with the Doctor around.


End file.
